Katie Kitamura’s most recent books, A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021) – each narrated by an unnamed woman upping sticks for Europe in the wake of emotional upheaval – were among several American novels to take inspiration from the coolly analytical style of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, centred on marital strife between an actor and an art critic in New York, likewise deploys that Outline-patented register of philosophical meditation, this time to unsettling and even unfathomable purpose – which is another way of saying I just didn’t get it.
Mystery reigns from the start. We’ve got another unnamed narrator, who visits a restaurant to meet Xavier, 25, nearly half her age. The meeting is “something I had not chosen to share with Tomas”, her husband, “although I didn’t know why”, a caveat that sounds the keynote for a coy guessing game. “I want you to know that I accept what you told me,” Xavier tells her; we have no idea what he means, but it’s only page 8, and we’re enjoying the tension. When the narrator tells him: “I don’t think we should see each other again… No relationship between us can be possible,” it’s a feint that wrongfoots us for the moment when – still only 40 pages in, no spoiler – we’re told this isn’t about sex: the “conflict in the air between us… read as carnal interest [but] the actual story, the reality of what was happening between us in that moment, was much less easily imagined”.
